3780 vertical feet today. A little saturday skiing for a couple of hours whilst Paula got back into the swing of cross-country skiing. Not sure if I'm going to be going tomorrow or not - temps are coming down again and it was fairly hard-pack and icy up there today. We'll see.

Ski helmets - I apparently have the same problem with them as I do with motorbike helmets. In short : my head is too big for the average helmet. We trawled around REI, Garts and Dick's before ending up at Sports Den in Foothill Village. Fortunately the bloke I spoke to there is also afflicted with a large bonce and he immediately recommended a 2007 model helmet with an adjustable lining. It looked promising - it was the first one I tried all day that actually fit. At $200 though it was more than I was looking to spend. We came down a little and I ended up with a Giro X10 XXL which fits a damn site better than the Giro9 XXL. Apparently Giro have no consistency in their sizes. Of course getting a helmet meant getting a new pair of goggles too so that it all fit together properly. Ho hum.The most interesting place was Dick's who told me they only did children's helmets. Go figure.

That's how much Ford lost last year. A $12.7 billion (with a B) loss. I know they build crappy cars but that's still a pretty amazing figure. It makes you wonder how they can stay in business. I wonder if Jim Oyler moved there or something?

Human-caused global warming is here -- visible in the air, water and melting ice -- and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."

I still have a problem with all the "evidence" that we're being shown to support these theories. For example, that temperature has risen 1.2°F between 1901 and 2005. The climatologist freely admit that they only have reliable climate data going back 60 to 65 years which would put the earliest reliable measurement sometime around 1940. Any time before that and you're looking at woolly, unreliable data. The temperature change between 1940-ish and now is about 0.4°F positive. So it seems the majority of this shift happened in the 40 years in which we conveniently don't have any reliable data.This is only the tip (if you'll excuse the climatological pun) of the iceberg. We're presented with photos of glaciers melting and disappearing. Well that's what they do - glaciers are made of ice. They form where precipitation and meltwater freezes against the back wall of a glacial valley. So to look at it another way, warmer weather, which brings more precipitation, ought to be causing glacier buildup. Do you see how ridiculous that argument sounds?Look, people. The earth is still coming out of an ice age. Of course it's bloody well getting warmer. Historically, the average temperatures of the earth have been far higher than they are today. Unless this ice age is somehow different from every other warm/cold cycle in earth's history, it's inevitable. The question is how much impact humanity is having on the temperature and/or climate. I argue not as much as we're being told.

This is one of those graphs the global-warming panicmongers just hate to see because it takes all the wind out of their arguments:

See a pattern there do you? That's from the Vostok Ice Core - a factual piece of data rather than conjecture. Look it up on Google - it's easy enough to find these facts.

Look, there's literally hundreds of holes in the climtatologist's theories, not least of which this: it was the same group of people who only 30 years ago were so worried about the apparent cooling off of the planet that they were seriously talking about pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to cause warming. 30 years ago, everyone was convinced that they were 100% totally and wholly correct and that they knew everything there was to know about climate. As far as they were concerned, they were right and that was the end of it.Funny story. Turns out they were 100% totally and wholly wrong.

Remember DDT? The experts were 100% positive it was the absolute best way to fight household pests.Remember Agent Orange? The experts were 100% positive it was THE way to solve insect infestations in crops.Remember when the sun revolved around the earth?

The only thing we can be 100% sure of right now is that relatively speaking, the experts are all 100% wrong. Given the immense timescales we're talking about, this lot are get frothy at the mouth over nothing as best I can tell. We're speculating based on 60 years of data on a planet that is tens of millions of years old.

OK sure we pollute - nobody's saying we don't. But you can't discount natural factors - something the climatologists are prone to doing. And to suggest that humans are causing or accelerating this cycle of warming is simply laughable.

But, say the critics, look how warm it's been in northern europe! Heat waves killing dozens in France and Germany. Record wind storms and rain! It's unequivicable proof that we're warming up! Well duh. Like I said - we're coming out of an ice age. But consider this: If the planet really was warming up at the speed they'd have us believe, the north of Europe would be in the deep freeze. This is one of those well-published facts that the majority of the table-bangers will be careful to avoid because it so devastatingly undermines their theories that it's best not discussed. It's called the transatlantic conveyor - it's the current that brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up and around the English channel and the northwestern shores of Europe. IF the earth was warming up and ice was melting at the rate we're told, the freshwater to saltwater balance would be tipped in the north atlantic and it would force the transatlantic conveyor further south towards north Africa. If that happened, England would suddenly acquire weather commensurate with its latitude. ie. fucking cold. The warmer weather, stronger winds and longer rains are all symptoms of a warmer north europe, not a colder north europe. For it to be that warm, it means MORE warm water from the gulf is ending up up there, not less. The transatlantic conveyor is stronger than ever.

I'm sorry. I just don't buy it. Humans have such a negligable effect on the overall temperature I'm just not concerned about it.

Now we live in the US, our household carbon footprint is 10 tons a year - well below the average of 18.58 for America and only slightly above the average of 9.85 for England. So you can talk to me all you like about climate change - I don't believe it's happening anywhere near the speed or immediacy that we're being told, and with our carbon footprint and energy conservation principles, I sure as hell don't feel even remotely guilty.

Oh - one last thing - if you're going to believe the scientists and climatologists who tell us this stuff, make sure they're not a political group who's "facts" are more to do with advancing political agendas than anything else. In some cases their facts have less truth to them than Hersheys have chocolate in their products. And that's saying something. This lot especially....

It's good to see standard have dropped so low back in England. In Devon, the Brits' latent criminality has come to the surface after the MSC Napoli beached off the coast and containers started washing ashore. Hundreds of people have been looting the containers for SUVs, car parts and BMW motorbikes. The police have been totally useless (as they always are in England) and have basically given everyone forms to fill in to declare what they've taken. Because that's going to work.These fuckers who are looting the ship obviously don't think anything of it, but they'll be the first to complain when the price of cars or motorbikes goes up. Then they won't be able to see the correlation. I think that whole country is in need of some martial law - the police are too soft on the crimes that count, and too Nazi on those that don't. 5mph over the speed limit? You're a criminal. Looting, robbing, mugging? That's fine - just don't be too overt about it. All the police need to be replaced by actual police officers and those news ones all need to be given guns and told to shoot these bastards on sight. That's the only way retards like this are ever going to learn.I remember when the original Police Academy films came out, Sgt. Hooks was such a laugh because she was so short and incapable. That was in the days when there were standards to get into the police. Now, because of political correctness, half the police in England are under 6ft tall, none of them carry weapons and as a result, they're the laughing stock of the crime world. The only people afraid of the police any more are motorists, because so much time is spent criminalising them for nothing that it's nearly impossible to drive a car over there any more. So I suppose in essence, we can blame the police for the looting of this ship - if the police were any good (or even cared), then they'd have had SWAT teams down there guarding the containers. Instead, they're just standing there watching. I wouldn't be surprised if they're helping some of the looters get stuff off the beach.